02/10/2022
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/09/28/1060057/pandemic-black-women-domestic-violence/.
The created a “perfect storm” for at risk of . Before the pandemic, Black women were already more likely than other women to be killed by their partners. Then covid made it even harder for them to get help.
Starr Davis was smitten when she met a handsome stranger with flawless skin and a wide smile during a brief trip to Houston in March 2020. He was charming and persistent; she gave him her phone number and they started talking.
Their whirlwind romance took a major turn when she told him that she was pregnant. His aggressive behaviour started to make her uncomfortable. But he was the father of her child. So, with some reservations, she packed up her life in New York City and moved to Texas.
She hadn’t had much of a relationship with her own dad—maybe things could be different for her firstborn. Being able to work remotely at her job at the onset of the covid-19 pandemic made the transition easier. She got an apartment, and he moved in, and she hoped for the best.
But he became physically abusive a few weeks in and then forbade her from setting foot outside. He’d say it was to protect her and their unborn child from covid. With no friends or close family nearby for support, she suffered in silence, her partner watching her every move.
Oftentimes her only refuge was hiding out in the small walk-in closet in their bedroom. “I took naps in the closet. I cried in the closet,” Davis tearfully recalls. “I tried to kill myself in the closet.” Davis suspects her abuser’s challenges predated their relationship.
But she believes the stresses of the pandemic exacerbated them. And she suspects those circumstances affected her decision-making too. “If there was not a pandemic going on, I would have left,” she says. “I definitely would have left.”
Covid seems to have made things worse for many women experiencing violence at home. Data on domestic violence during the pandemic is hard to come by—especially since cases often go unreported.
But anti-domestic-violence advocates point to dramatic increases in calls to shelters and support groups. Many care workers see indications that this increase in domestic violence seems to have disproportionately affected Black women like Davis.
The health and financial challenges of the pandemic, which also disproportionately affected Black women, led to many feeling trapped in their homes, unable to escape their abusers.
But more than two and half years after the pandemic began, there remains a significant gap between the needs of Black women experiencing domestic violence and the care they’re able to access.
“We will see the fallout of the hidden abuse for years to come,” Lewis says. Even before the pandemic, Black women faced a crisis of violence. Data from a 2017 study by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that Black women were significantly more likely than white women to be killed by an acquaintance.
More than half of all homicides among women—about 55%—were related to intimate partner violence, or IPV (domestic violence perpetrated by a spouse or romantic partner).
US Census data suggests that the pandemic affected Black households more than white households in terms of the cumulative effects of job loss, food insufficiency, and financial insecurity.
Economic and health disparities can put someone at greater risk for domestic violence and make it harder to get help, says Karma Cottman, who helms the National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community (also known as Ujima: The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community), based in Washington, DC.
“What we saw, and to some degree still are seeing, are the layers of vulnerability that exist for Black women and for the Black community that were exacerbated by the pandemic,” Cottman says.
Lewis says many Black women who’ve received services from her organization have reported feeling mistreated and disrespected at some domestic violence shelters.
“As Black women, they [feel that they] are judged harsher, often made to feel like they traded one abuse for another,” says Lewis. “They report being asked stereotypical questions that women of other ethnicities are not.”
The lack of culturally sensitive support that Black women report shows up in big and small ways. For example, many shelters fail to provide products that work best for Black women’s skin and hair. Starr Davis says she never felt comfortable calling the police out of fear she “might [end up] dead too” or get arrested.
“It almost felt like a risk factor to call the police,” she says. But two months after her daughter’s birth, she summoned up the courage to leave her abuser, a complicated and terrifying process that she’s still amazed she survived.
She has since relocated to another state, started a new job and begun writing poetry. Therapy has helped her work through her painful experience and recognize internal issues that often keep Black women like her in abusive relationships, and she hopes speaking publicly about it will help others in similar situations.
“That ‘strong Black woman’ trope—yeah, I think that’s what pretty much what stops us from getting help,” she says. “Like, [we’re] just carrying that cross every time and not really knowing that it’s okay to just be vulnerable human beings that need help, just like anybody else.”
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